Matter(ing) by Design:
Delegating Decisions / Activating Agency
Speakers
Rachel Abrams
Founder, Turnstone Consulting LLC
Rachel Abrams is founder of Turnstone Consulting in Brooklyn, NY. Trained as an interaction designer at the Royal College of Art in London, she has lived in the US since 2000, working for IBM and Imagination before setting up her collaborative strategic design studio in 2006. In 2007, she led research to define the future of the yellow cab industry for the City of New York as a fellow of the Design Trust for Public Space. In 2012 she was Special Advisor to the Department of Transportation’s Walk NY project, the citywide way finding system for New York’s pedestrians and Citibikers. A regular consultant to Pentagram Design in New York, Rachel is a recent board member of the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) New York (where she co-led the funding application for their post-Sandy Design/Relief program). She has been a member of faculty at the School of Visual Arts since 2009. In 2014, she was commissioned by the Open Society Foundations to contribute to their Inquiry on Technology and the Future of Work. The film she contributed to that Inquiry is the focus of her talk today.
Ian Bogost
Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Ian Bogost is an award-winning author and game designer whose work focuses on videogames and computational media. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. Bogost is Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing.
Debbie Chachra
Associate Professor. Materials Science, Olin College
Debbie Chachra is an Associate Professor of Materials Science at Olin College of Engineering, where she was one of the early faculty (the College graduated its first class in 2006). Her technical background and research is in biological materials, and her current research interests include the engineering student experience, with a particular interest in underrepresented groups. As part of Olin College’s mission is to transform engineering education, she works with other engineering schools around the world to help them design student-centred learning experiences that incorporate findings from educational psychology to foster motivation, engagement, and the development of self-directed learning. She also speaks, writes and consults around gender and diversity, particularly in science and technology environments. She writes a regular column, “Reinventions”, for the American Society for Engineering Education’s Prism magazine. Prior to joining the faculty at Olin, she was a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she received her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering at the University of Toronto. She is on Twitter as @debcha.
David Gissen
Associate Professor, Architecture, California College of Art
David Gissen is the author of several historical and experimental works exploring concepts of environment and nature in the built environment. He is a professor in the architecture programs at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Andy Norman
Professor of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University
Andy Norman teaches philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University and writes about the philosophical foundations of humanism. Before that, he worked as a technology designer, creating award-winning software for strengthening critical thinking skills. His model of the “reason-giving game” inspired the popular educational computer game Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher. He likes to think about the architecture of knowledge systems, the logic of inquiry, the nature of wisdom, and the evolutionary origins of human reasoning. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Free Inquiry and Philosophical Quarterly. Andy has a PhD from Northwestern University, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan.
Trebor Scholz
Associate Professor of Culture and Media, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts
Trebor Scholz is an artist, writer, and conference organizer and the chair of the conference series The Politics of Digital Culture at The New School. He is the author of a monograph on the history of the social Web and its Orwellian economies (forthcoming from Polity). He is also the author, with Laura Y. Liu, of From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City (2011). Mr. Scholz is the editor of Learning Through Digital Media and a volume on digital labor (Routledge, 2012). He co-edited the nine-volume Situated Technologies series and The Art of Free Cooperation (Autonomedia, 2007). Recent book chapters include “Facebook as Playground and Factory,” “Points of Control,” and “Cheaper by the Dozen: An Introduction to Crowdsourcing.” Mr. Scholz has spoken at 150 conferences internationally. He also founded the Institute for Distributed Creativity, which is widely known for its online discussions of critical network culture. Dr. Scholz holds a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He has chaired seven major conferences and co-chaired the 2011 Digital Media and Learning conference in Los Angeles.
Frano Violich
Principal, Kennedy & Violich Architecture Ltd.
As a Founding Principal at KVA Matx, Frano Violich has created an interdisciplinary design practice which engages material fabrication, digital technology, and the conservation of natural resources to expand the public life of buildings and cities. Violich studied architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his Masters of Architecture from Harvard University. Violich has served as Design Commissioner with the Boston Society of Architects, co-chaired the Design Industry Group of Massachusetts’ (DIGMA) Advisory Board, and currently serves on the Editorial Board of Architecture Boston. Starting this year Violich begins a three-year-term on the BSA Honors & Awards Committee. Violich was elected to the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows in 2009.
Alfred Zollinger
Associate Professor, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons School of Design
Alfred Zollinger is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Interior Design at Parsons School of Design. He is the director of the Design Workshop, Parsons’ signature design and build program that works collaboratively with non-profit and governmental partners on a range of projects. He is also co-director of Matter Practice, an architecture and exhibition-design firm founded with Sandra Wheeler. Zollinger’s work is informed by his early training as a precision machinist and interest in making as a mode of critical inquiry. He studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and completed his post-professional studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has taught at the ETH, in Zurich, RISD, and, since 2006, at Parsons.
Genevieve Bell
Anthropologist; Vice President and Fellow, Director of Corporate Sensing & Insights Group, Intel
Genevieve Bell is a Vice President and Intel Fellow in the Corporate Strategy Office at Intel. Bell joined Intel in 1998 as a researcher in the Corporate Technology Group’s People and Practices Research team – Intel’s first social science oriented research team. She helped drive the company’s first non-U.S. field studies to inform business group strategy and products and conducted groundbreaking work in urban Asia in the early 2000s. Bell currently leads an R&D team of social scientists, interaction designers, and human factors engineers to drive consumer-centric product innovation in Intel’s consumer electronics business. In this role she is responsible for setting research directions, conducting comparative qualitative and quantitative research globally, leading new product strategy and definition, and championing consumer-centric innovation and thinking across the company.
Prior to joining Intel, Bell was a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She has written more than 25 journal articles and book chapters on a range of subjects focused on the intersection of technology and society. Her book, Telling Techno Cultural Tales, co-authored with Professor Paul Dourish, is being published by MIT Press. Raised in Australia, Bell received her Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in 1990. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1993 and 1998, respectively.
Stuart Candy
Director of the Situation Lab, Foresight & Design Professor, OCAD University, and Fellow of The Long Now Foundation
Stuart Candy works at the intersection of design and foresight, producing participatory, guerrilla, and experiential futures interventions to pattern a wiser and more vital culture. He is currently Director of the Situation Lab and Assistant Professor of Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University (Ontario College of Art and Design). A professional futurist (advisor, researcher and facilitator) for over a decade, Stuart has worked with leading organisations around the world. In 2014 he co-created the generative design fiction card game “The Thing From The Future”, which has been used in settings from Stanford d.School, to Nesta’s FutureFest in London, to the UNDP’s annual strategy meeting in New York. He was previously Australasia Foresight and Innovation Leader for the global design and engineering firm Arup.
Clive Dilnot
Professor of Design Studies, Parsons School of Design
Clive Dilnot is professor of Design Studies in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, which he joined in 2002 as Senior Associate Dean in Academic Affairs. Previously, he was professor of Design Studies and Director of Design Initiatives at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and taught at Harvard University and at universities and colleges in England, Hong Kong, and Australia. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Rhode Island School of Design. He has lectured, given keynote addresses, and acted as visiting critic at universities worldwide.
Originally educated as a fine artist, Dilnot later began studying social philosophy and the sociology of culture with Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Dilnot has worked on the history, theory, and criticism of the visual arts in their broadest terms. Although his teaching and writing has focused on design history, criticism, and theory, Dilnot’s scholarship includes the study of ethics—a subject he addressed in his book Ethics? Design? published in 2005—and the role of design capabilities in creating a humane world.
Shannon Mattern
Associate Professor, Media Studies, New School for Public Engagement
Shannon Mattern is an Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School. Her research and teaching address relationships between the forms and materialities of media and the spaces (architectural, urban, conceptual) they create and inhabit. She writes about libraries and archives, media companies’ headquarters, place branding, public design projects, urban media art, media acoustics, media infrastructures, and material texts. She’s the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities (2007) and Deep Mapping the Media City (2015), both published by the University of Minnesota Press; and she’s a columnist for Places, a journal covering architecture, landscape, and urbanism.
Linda Pollak
Founding partner, Marpillero Pollak Architects
Linda Pollak is an architect, landscape designer and educator. She works with clients and communities to imaginatively formulate and develop projects at multiple scales in relationship to social and environmental concerns. Her firm, Marpillero Pollak Architects, (MPA) is part of the NYC Department of Design + Construction Design Excellence Program, which currently includes a new 30,500 sq. ft. library in Elmhurst Queens. Linda is currently collaborating with Dewitt Clinton High School on the James Baldwin Memorial Outdoor Learning Center. Linda was a member of the Harvard GSD Faculty from 1992 to 2004, serves on the Board of Directors of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, the Design Trust for Public Space, and other organizations. Her writings about architecture and urban landscape have been published in books and journals.
Cameron Tonkinwise
Director of Design Studies at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University
Cameron Tonkinwise is the Director of Design Studies at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. He also directs the School of Design’s Doctoral research program. Cameron has a background in philosophy and continues to research what designers can learn from philosophies of making, material culture studies, and sociologies of technology. His primary area of research is sustainable design. In particular, he focuses on the design of systems that lower societal materials intensity, primarily by decoupling use and ownership - in other words, systems of shared use. Cameron has published a range of articles on the role of design, and in particular, service design, in the promotion of the sharing economy and collaborative consumption.
Susan Yelavich
Associate Professor; Director, MA Design Studies, Parsons School of Design
Susan Yelavich is an associate professor and director of the MA Design Studies program in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons The New School for Design. Her research explores the cross-disciplinary dynamics of global culture and design, the relationship between textiles and architecture, and the parallels between design and literature. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Design as Future-Making (Bloomsbury, 2014), Contemporary World Interiors (Phaidon, 2007), Pentagram/Profile (Phaidon, 2004), Inside Design Now (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2003), Design for Life (Whitney Library of Design, 1997), and The Edge of the Millennium: An International Critique of Architecture, Urban Planning, Product and Communication Design (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 1993). A fellow of the American Academy in Rome, she was awarded the Academy’s Rolland Prize in Design in 2003. She lectures widely and has taught at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) in Milan, Italy, and the New School’s Transregional Center for Democratic Studies in Wroclaw, Poland.